Almost fifteen years after the institution of the National Park some Pollino inhabitants start to wonder. "Are we better now? What did we gain and what did we loose?"
Questions like these tell us that there is still something wrong, that many expectations have been betrayed, that some potentialities are still unexpressed, that not all the values existing in the territory have been transformed into development resources.
This statement show us how useful can be to question about what a natural park should really be: a glass biosphere in which a piece of landscape has to be closed and entirely preserved, exactly as it is, for next generations, leaving to decay all the rest of the area? Is it really "natural" to think about a place immutable in time?
If we don't want to condemn next generations to pay the consequences of our actions we need to discover new alternative ways to realize a virtuous development able to put human actions in harmony with the natural cycles.
Parks should be mainly places of experimentation; they shouldn't be beset fortresses far from "normal" world, but laboratories in the forefront in proposing effective systems that can be recognized as good practices to be applied even out of the park boundaries. These topics are today relevant everywhere in the world because natural resources, not only oil or water, are going to be shorter and shorter and compromised everyday and the climatic balances themselves have already been hardly put to the test. Protected natural areas can become crucial places in developing a new approach to these problems.